What is the significance of the caret (^) symbol in defining character classes in PHP regular expressions?

The caret (^) symbol is used in PHP regular expressions to define a character class that matches any character except those listed within the brackets. This allows for more precise pattern matching by excluding specific characters from the match. 

// Example: Matching any character except vowels
$string = "Hello World";
if (preg_match('/[^aeiou]/', $string)) {
    echo "String contains a non-vowel character.";
} else {
    echo "String contains only vowels.";
}

Keywords

PHP regular expressions caret symbol character classes significance

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